What Are Your Desert Island TV Networks? Apparently Not CBS, MTV or ESPN.

In a TV landscape moving with deliberate speed toward Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, small network groups are coming under increasingly intense pressure to figure out a new plan. In a new consumer survey published this morning by the research group The Diffusion Group (TDG), U.S. consumers overwhelmingly said they would opt for familiar brands with big content offerings if they could assemble their own channel lineups.

That’s great news for networks like NBC, FX, Disney Channel and TNT that are owned by big, global players and uh-oh-time-for-a-new-plan news for networks like CBS, MTV, Discovery and AMC that are owned by smaller players. And it’s hair-on-fire news for ESPN, which the survey broke out separately from corporate owner Disney.

“Live Big-4 broadcast viewing is diminishing, as with virtually every major network,” TDG research director Michael Greeson noted in the report. “This should not imply, however, that their death as brands or as major forces in consumer video is inevitable. The value of their content is immense; top of mind for many viewers.”

CBS fared the worst of the Big 4 networks, ranking behind the groups that include NBC, FOX and ABC broadcast channels, and also ranked behind Turner, which owns dominant cable properties TNT, TBS, CNN, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim. CBS’s No. 5 ranking in the survey is largely due to the strength of its own brand, as its Pop and Smithsonian Channel networks are left out of many cable plans and its Showtime premium channel costs extra.

CBS’s streaming service CBS All Access has grown to an estimated 2.5 million U.S. subscribers and has buzzy originals like Star Trek: Discovery and The Good Fight, but Netflix (55 million), Amazon’s Prime Video (26 million) and Hulu (17 million) have far larger U.S. consumer bases and bigger content lineups. Hulu, in particular, includes new and catalog programming from NBCUniversal and Disney, which were the top two groups on the survey. And Disney is launching its own streaming service next year that will include Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar and Disney catalog and original titles.

Two recent events that are not accounted for in the survey — Disney’s pending acquisition of Fox’s FX, National Geographic and NatGeo Wild cable channels, and Discovery’s just-completed acquisition of Scripps Networks Interactive and its HGTV, Food Network and Travel Channel would likely have tipped the survey even more toward the larger network groups.

Viacom, which owns VH1, MTV, BET and Nickelodeon, ranked only 10th in the survey. Wall Street analysts have given Viacom CEO Bob Bakish high marks for the company’s international expansion and turnarounds at MTV and at its Paramount studio, but Viacom and the other small network groups are short on big-time brands like Disney’s Avengers and Star Wars, Time Warner’s Justice League and Game of Thrones, and NBCUniversal’s huge list of film and TV properties that includes Bravo’s Real Housewives shows, NBC’s The Voice and Sunday Night Football, and Minions and Universal’s Fast & Furious franchises.

The big squeeze that the big streamers and network groups are putting on smaller media companies explains the Discovery-Scripps merger, Disney’s announced acquisition of Fox’s entertainment assets, and speculation around a rumored CBS-Viacom-Lionsgate team-up, but the consumer shift from traditional TV to streaming is moving faster than smaller media companies can scale up. Many mergers take up to a year to complete and even longer to absorb, and Netflix added a stunning 24 million worldwide subscribers in 2017.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider, is a contributing writer for Playboy, and hosts a weekly podcast about new digital content called Consumed with Scott Porch. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.